‘Vanderpump Villa’ Is the Best Unintentional April Fools' Joke No One Asked For

By Emma Chance | TV | April 1, 2024 |

By Emma Chance | TV | April 1, 2024 |

Remember when Vanderpump Rules was about the staff at Lisa Vanderpump’s Los Angeles restaurants, back before said staff members got too famous for bartending and waitressing? In those early days, it was like Below Deck but for the food service industry (and the workers were much less skilled than those of the BD universe). Now it and it’s a recent spinoff, The Valley, follows the same people who once served pumptinis and goat cheese balls to the people of West Hollywood, as they instead deal with divorces, brand deals, and babies. But Vanderpump Villa wants to revitalize that old model.

The premise goes like this: Lisa Vanderpump is renting an existing French countryside villa, Château St. Joseph—renamed Château Rosabelle—for a luxury hospitality “trial run” of a “Vanderpump curated experience” complete with hot hospitality professionals (varying degrees of professionalism apply) who are eager for Instagram influencer-level fame and willing to make fools of themselves to achieve it.

It’s unclear what the show will be if it proves succesful. Will Lisa Vanderpump pop up at other country estates around the world? Will there be a rotating cast like on Below Deck, but Lisa will be the proverbial captain every time? If they’d really wanted to plagiarize the universally popular magic that is Below Deck, though, they would have found existing (read: real) luxury villas in various resort locations, with actual hospitality professionals built in à la White Lotus, and then sprinkled their own bartenders and maids in as well, instead of popping up at what is essentially an Airbnb.

But in typical Vanderpump fashion, it’s all about the facade, and this time they’re not even hiding the fact that it is a facade. We’re beyond questioning or even caring about the technical realness of reality tv, but the Vanderpump brand has always walked that already thin line shakily, with its hyper-stylized interiors that could probably come tumbling town with the faintest breeze and its over-produced social situations that even the producers aren’t trying to disguise as organic anymore. With Vanderpump Villa—a literal construction of a temporary hotel with hard up workers and wealthy guests hand-picked for maximum drama and cameras at the ready—anyone still wondering if the people behind the scenes are in on the joke, are relieved of doubt. They aren’t, and that’s why it’s funny. They released a real show about a fake hotel with fake conflict on April Fools’ Day and didn’t even mean for it to be a prank. Finally, reality tv is stupid again.

The first three episodes of Vanderpump Villa are out on Hulu now, with new episodes airing Mondays.